Château de Meudon

Stand at the edge of the great terrace and feel the gravel shift under your shoes. The air up here moves more freely than in the streets below. On a clear day, the whole of Paris lies spread out to the northeast, a grey and silver plain cut by the curve of the Seine. Behind you, a pale stone building carries a dark dome on its roof. This is the Château de Meudon, or what remains of it, and it has watched over this view for centuries.

The first thing to understand is that you are not looking at one château. For most of its history, this hilltop held two. There was the Old Château, which grew through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Then there was the New Château, added later beside it. Only the second one survives today. The great empty space of the terrace where you stand was once filled with royal architecture, gardens and the busy life of a court.

The story begins in the reign of Francis the First, the Renaissance king of France. The estate came into the hands of Anne de Pisseleu, Duchess of Étampes, who was the king's favourite. Under her, and later under the powerful Cardinal of Lorraine, the house grew in size and ambition. Here is a small surprise. In the same century, the writer François Rabelais, author of the comic giants Gargantua and Pantagruel, held the parish of Meudon. French readers still call him the priest of Meudon.

In the seventeenth century, the estate passed through several ambitious owners. One of them was the Marquis de Louvois, the formidable war minister of Louis the Fourteenth. Louvois spent heavily to enlarge the house and its gardens. The great royal gardener André Le Nôtre, who also shaped the gardens of Versailles, worked on the grounds here. His love of long, straight lines and open views still shapes the place. Notice how the terrace pulls your eye far into the distance, as if the land itself was arranged for looking.

After Louvois died, Louis the Fourteenth bought the estate for his eldest son, Louis, known as the Grand Dauphin. The title Dauphin simply meant the heir to the French throne. The Grand Dauphin loved Meudon and made it his own small court, away from the formality of Versailles. He brought in the royal architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart to build a second residence. This was the New Château, the building whose stone body still stands behind you today.

The Grand Dauphin never became king. He died before his father, and Meudon slowly lost its place at the centre of royal life. Through the eighteenth century, the house was used less often and maintained less carefully. Then came the Revolution at the end of the century. The estate was taken by the state, and the hilltop found a new and surprising purpose. It became a place of military experiment rather than royal pleasure.

Here is a detail most visitors miss. During the revolutionary wars, the grounds of Meudon were used for early research with military balloons. Engineers and soldiers trained here to send observers up into the sky, to watch enemy armies from above. It is strange to imagine silk balloons rising over the clipped gardens of a prince. But this hilltop has always been about seeing far. In a way, the observers in their baskets were simply continuing the old work of the terrace.

The Old Château did not survive this period. It was badly damaged by fire in the 1790s and was later demolished in the early nineteenth century. Its loss explains the wide, open terrace you see now. The New Château remained, and in the following decades it served new masters. Under Napoleon, members of the imperial family stayed here, including the Empress Marie-Louise and her young son. Later, in the Second Empire, the estate was used by a cousin of Napoleon the Third.

Then came another disaster. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871, the hilltop was occupied, and the New Château was gutted by fire. For a few years, the building stood as a burned shell above the valley. It seemed that Meudon's story might end there, as a ruin. But the same height that had pleased princes now attracted a very different kind of visitor — a scientist looking for clear skies.

That scientist was the astronomer Jules Janssen, a pioneer in the study of the Sun. He saw that this hill, raised above the haze of Paris, was a fine place to watch the sky. He obtained the ruined château and founded an observatory here. The damaged building was restored and adapted, and a great dome was raised on top of it. Look up at that dark dome now. It holds the Grande Lunette, a large double refracting telescope among the biggest of its kind in Europe.

Today the château is part of the Paris Observatory, one of the oldest scientific institutions in France. Researchers have worked here for well over a century, studying the Sun, the planets and distant galaxies. That is why the building feels quiet and closed. It is a working scientific site, not a museum, so access to the interior and the observatory grounds is limited. Public visits happen only on special occasions. For most visitors, the terrace and the view are the experience.

And what an experience it is. The terrace remains one of the finest public viewpoints over Paris. Below the terrace, the long axis of the gardens, called the Grande Perspective, runs down the slope in the spirit of Le Nôtre. On a quiet weekday you will hear birds, distant traffic in the valley, and the crunch of other walkers on the gravel. Not far from here, in the same town, the sculptor Auguste Rodin spent his last years, drawn by the light and calm of Meudon.

Before you leave, take one last look across the valley. Somewhere in that space in front of you stood a Renaissance house, now gone. Behind you stands a prince's home that became a burned ruin, and then a telescope pointed at the stars. Few places have changed their purpose so many times while keeping the same view. As you walk back along the terrace, notice the line of the horizon. Princes, soldiers and astronomers all stood here and looked at that same line.